There’s a line from an old movie, Wheeler Dealers: “You don’t go wheeling and dealing for the money, you do it for fun. Money’s just a way of keeping… - Sam Zell

There’s a line from an old movie, Wheeler Dealers: “You don’t go wheeling and dealing for the money, you do it for fun. Money’s just a way of keeping score.

I didn’t know where I was headed, but, as always, I was very eager to get there.

I knew what the Equity Office portfolio was worth. And I knew we were undervalued by Wall Street. Every quarter, the management team would do an in-depth analysis of every asset in the portfolio to develop a real-time valuation. The most reliable measure of our buildings’ value remained — and had always been, in my opinion — replacement cost. Replacement cost mattered more to me than rents or comparable prices or vacancies or economic growth or stock price. This was because replacement cost determined the price of future competition.

didn’t know it then, but this phase in my career was the genesis of a mantra I would repeat regularly for decades to come: Liquidity equals value.